“Feeding the World”

On Thursday our cohort took a trip out to the organic farming company Earthbound Farms; our trip consisted of lunch in the patio and a tour of the garden and farm and a conversation with the director and CEO of Earthbound about the business’ history, legacy, and role in relation to peace building and environmental justice. The area was impressive – thriving herb gardens and lines of delicious berries, towering sunflowers and reflective stone mazes, the rich stories of how Earthbound had contributed to community health and the farming ‘industry’ as a whole – Earthbound was an impressive example of how organic farming could contribute to the beauty and development of a community.

 

The trip brought me back to our conversations the previous day about the value of local input to development and ‘peace’ and the tension between local knowledge and top down approaches and sparked some inner dialogue within myself on the importance of food, farming, and environmental justice as it pertains to the issues and fields I am exploring in peace building. As I mulled over the various thoughts regarding food, conflict, and environmental justice, our group ventured over to the Three Sisters. The Three Sisters in many indigenous Turtle Island societies was the foundation of culture and world view; the “three sisters” – beans, corn, and squash – are the literal agricultural staples of Turtle Island and each crop relies on depends on the other and the environment for survival. The beans rely on the corn for support, corn relies on the squash for mulch, and both rely on the beans for restoring the soil. As the Three Sisters were being presented in the garden I stood there in awe at the fact that these crops were the embodiment of local knowledge and power it could have in helping bring communities together. Indigenous communities spent centuries diversifying and domesticating these crops, a science that is rooted in local knowledge and history, to provide foods that provided sustenance to a community sustainably. As we continued I realized there was so much local knowledge here waiting to be tapped into. Each herb and crop in that garden had more than one use, and most had alternative uses that I didn’t even know about! It really drove home the point that if organizations and communities invest more in identifying and inventorying local knowledge and processes and utilized those processes into programs and activities that there might be a change in attitudes toward local identity and self-worth but also a change in the way community members view and treat each other.  Bringing programs that shoMP communities that organic farming is 1) affordable, 2) accessible, and 3) not entirely alien to food practices that many cultures already have could have a transformative effect on MP social conditions and benefit the “Feed the World” mission by first “Feeding the Home”.